THE LAST WORD…on MoD, plod, God and turning the sod

(Note that the views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily correspond to the views or offical position of the branch or the national union.)

I’ve just got back from a week on the Isle of Mull. If Mull isn’t the most beautiful place on God’s earth, then I don’t know what is. Actually, it’s not really God’s work, it’s volcanoes and ice erosion, but you get what I mean. While there, we made the trip over to Iona, set in a beautiful turquoise sea with white sand beaches. John Smith is buried in the graveyard there, along with socialism. The earth in the graveyard looks uneven and disturbed, presumably from the effect of Mr Smith turning in his grave. The graveyard, needless to say, has a view to die for.

News that may have passed you by is that the military working dogs in Afghanistan and Iraq are to get state of the art air- conditioned kennel units at a cost of £1.2 million, according to the MoD website (17 March 2008). That will cheer up the fighting force no end. I wonder how much body armour £1.2 million buys? But then the Brits have always though more of animals than people; the NSPCC, for example, takes in less per year in donations than the Donkey Sanctuary. The fines for cruelty to animals are far higher than fines for assaulting a human – I’m a magistrate, so I should know. You might say that’s because animals can’t answer back or protest, but hypocrites that we are, we still happily eat them or wear their skins on our feet. Go figure.

Anyway, just to cheer you up, and to show that EDS aren’t heartless bastards who don’t look after staff, here is a snippet I dug out from the New York Times archive: ”Electronic Data Systems, the technology-outsourcing company, said Wednesday that it had offered extra retirement benefits to about 12,000 employees in the United States if they would retire early.” (September 13, 2007) See, they are all heart. So when push comes to shove, just remind them of that offer. What’s good enough for Americans is good enough for British workers as well. There’s actually quite on lot on the NYT archive about EDS, and none of it makes particularly edifying reading, though most of it is historical, I have to say. Another way of looking at that, though, would be that the NYT reckons they’ve been shifty for years. Don’t the MoD do any research before buddying up to outside organisations? Mind you, anybody that will pay £1.2 million for kennels is not, perhaps, the most assiduous guardian of the public purse.

It would appear that my comments about the music snippets on the blog, i.e. that PCS officials don’t appear to have listened to any music after 1985, has had no effect whatsoever. (And I doubt that my comment about haircuts has had any effect either.) If you are wondering who suggested the “I wish that they’d sack me” song from Chumbawamba’s latest album “The boy bands have won…” it was me. It’s quite brilliant – best described, I suppose, as anarchist folk music. If you can’t find it, all the lyrics are on http://www.chumba.com/, but don’t try to access the site from work in your lunch break, it would be blocked by the thought police. (You can’t even access The Onion from work – I tried once.) I don’t think that Chumbawamba’s politics exactly chime with the philosophy of the MoD. To quote from their “Same old same old” song on the album, “Lately it seems no-one cares anymore that peace is a place where we rest between wars”. And that song was written 25 years ago. Things don’t change much, do they? Proverbs Ch26 v11 springs to mind. (Don’t go looking for a bible in the PCS office, you’d be wasting your time.)

The latest snippet on the blog (at the time of writing - Blogger), from a Jethro Tull song, should remind you that this great band, who I saw a few weeks back on their 40th anniversary tour, started out at Blackpool Grammar School, and are still going strong; which is more than can be said for Blackpool Grammar School. Jethro Tull took their name from the 18th century agriculturalist who invented the automated seed drill that changed working on the land forever. (Knowledge snippet) Anyway,I note that the MoD police have been sniffing round the PCS office, and that management want the site to be closed to non-members and password protected. Management ought to re-examine Article 10 of the Human Rights Act. Nothing on the blog (or in these articles) is not in the public domain. Or a threat to national security, unless sarcasm is classified as such. Anyway, I wait with bated breath for the knock on the door from MoD plod, or even worse, the heavies from PCS asking for subs.

Finally, has anyone else noticed that when one of those speed devices is at the side of the road – one of those that tells you the speed you are travelling at – everyone drives by at 29mph? I don’t. I always try to do 31 or 32mph. Listening to Chumbawamba does that – makes you rebellious.

PCS MoD Pay Claim 2008

Colleagues,

PCS MoD PAY CLAIM 2008 - MEMBERS MEETING
Thursday 26th June 2008
10:00 to 11:00am in TOMMIES

Members are advised that we have a pay meeting planned for 26th June. Dougie Brownlie, SPVA TUS Chair and GEC member will be present to outline the 2008 Pay Claim and will answer any questions you might have on the subject. One hours facility time has been given for you to attend this meeting.

Please read the literature linked to below, Annex 1 – A draft cover letter to the Personnel Director on pay Annex 2 – The draft PCS MoD

http://www.pcs.org.uk/en/ministry_of_defence_group/june-2008-documents/pay-update-annexes.cfm

Pay Claim for 2008 Annex 3 – An explanatory annex that would be appended to the Pay Claim. Annex 4 – The PCS Pay Claim – Key Issues for discussion document


Finally, please note that the intention is to ballot all members on the pay claim in due course so this meeting is your opportunity to discuss pay with a member of the GEC.

PCS MoD Pay Claim

Members are advised that PCS MoD Group have agreed that one of their priorities on pay in 2008 is to consult all members on our draft pay claim for 2008 in order to ensure that it best meets our aspirations and concerns.

From the link below you will find:

Annex 1 – A draft cover letter to the Personnel Director on pay Annex 2 – The draft PCS MoD Pay Claim for 2008 Annex 3 – An explanatory annex that would be appended to the Pay Claim. Annex 4 – The PCS Pay Claim – Key Issues for discussion document

http://www.pcs.org.uk/en/ministry_of_defence_group/june-2008-documents/pay-update-annexes.cfm

Group are asking all Branches to undertake 2 simple tasks:

1. Circulate the draft pay claim and supporting materials to all members (of which this forms part).2. Hold a meeting - to which all members are invited to discuss our pay claim and to feed members views back to group (to be announced).

If you have views on the Key Issues contained in Annex 4, it would be useful if you could make these known ahead of the meeting in writing to the Branch Secretary, Ian Melvin by email or to room 6117, Norcross.

THAT’S THE ATTITUDE

As members will be aware, the union has for some time been trying to obtain the results of the SPVA Staff Survey, not least because we had reasons to believe it contained evidence of serious and ongoing health & safety issues. I can now report that we were given sight of the data on the afternoon of the 4th of June, too short a period to do any form of in-depth analysis, and so this represents our first impression of the findings.

First, it must be made clear that though the TU side were not at all happy about the form, method and content of the survey questions from the outset, we will still analyse the results in what we consider to be a professional, fair and balanced way. To that end, we will begin with some the most significant positives to be gleaned from them.

Over 82% of all staff, civilian, military and EDS are proud that their work supports the Armed Forces and Veterans.
Similarly, over 80% of all staff feel they are treated with fairness and respect from their colleagues, and;
Over 80% of all staff feel they are treated with fairness and respect by their line managers.
In addition, over 80% of all staff feel they are offered the opportunity to work flexibly where their jobs allow.

We are pleased to see that staff and line managers work in an environment of mutual fairness and respect, where they are proud to support the customer, and where family friendly policies, hard won by the unions over the years, allow staff the opportunity to adjust their work life balance by working flexibly.

Now to the negatives, and we will begin with a brief look at the results appertaining to AFPAA/VA merger.

On average only about a quarter of staff believe that people in SPVA are responding positively to the merger.
And even less believe that senior management have communicated openly and honestly about the changes associated with the merger.
Significantly less than 20% of all staff feel that senior management is capitalising on the opportunities offered by the merger to improve the way SPVA operates. But as only 25% of senior management think so themselves, this is hardly a surprising finding, if still worrying!

These results indicate to us that the merger has been less than effective. Perhaps contributing to those feelings indicated are the fact that:

Only about a third of all staff believes that communications within SPVA are effective, though 65% of senior management believe otherwise?
With only around 30% believing everyone in SPVA is working towards a common goal, the oft sang hymn on ‘partnership’ seems to be little off key, if not downright flat!
That only around 20% of staff thinks that people in SPVA rarely look for someone to blame when things go wrong, indicates a prevalent blame culture,
And even less believe that changes to business processes and/or technology are well managed within SPVA, despite the evident focus of persons and resources that have been toiling on this area for many a moon.

These results indicate that despite ours being a process driven, technology supported business, at its heart SPVA senior management is poor at managing and implementing change, quick to blame personnel for failings arising from poor management and just plain wrong in their fundamental understanding about how to communicate almost anything of importance to their staff. We believe management’s continual failure to engage in real and meaningful consultation with the TU side is a symptom of this attitude.

But overriding all those concerns we must now direct our attention to the most significant results of the survey overall.

· 7.5% of all staff say they have been the victim of bullying or harassment within the last twelve months, a figure that suggests that staff numbered in excess of a hundred are experiencing unacceptable behaviours from some persons around them, and possibly linked to this is;
· That 25% of all staff say that stress at work has affected their health in the last 12 months. This means that there are many hundreds of people in this organisation whose quality of life and indeed life expectancy is being directly affected by what is happening in the workplace.

Given the results previously discussed, it seems evident that the sources of the reported bullying, harassment and indeed stress do not in most cases originate from colleagues, line managers or indeed the clients we support. No, the root cause underlying this alarming data is clearly a blame culture that seeks to distract and disguise from, let’s face it, poor management, inadequate communications and tense partner/supplier relationships. The making of scapegoats, be they individuals or groups, has not been a recommended management tool since Roman times and the bad old days of the Decimation. We firmly believe the results of this survey clearly indicates there needs to be a sea change in the management style of SPVA.

Our hopes have been raised in that we are told that DCSC-MS-AD, absolutely welcomes TUS contribution in the development of meaningful action plans and seeks to ensure that effective consultation follows the publication of the survey results. We will keep members informed of this progress, and will offer further detailed analysis of the findings as time allows.

Shut it!

We’ve been under sustained pressure from management side for some time now to restrict our Blogging activities. The worst of which was a visit from a MoD Police Officer, working for our security, who had come to our office to warn us about our activities. The actions breached all Mod and Cabinet Office rules on dealing with such issues. What seems to have caused particular ranker was our article about the agency failing one of it’s key ministerial targets. More specifically EDS failing a key ministerial target with JPA. Now there is no suggestion that we have ever reported inaccurately or incorrectly, if we had we would admit to it and issue retraction. What we’re talking about here is embarrassment, senior managers and no doubt EDS are not too happy to have their failures widely reported. But ministerial targets are in the public domain and certainly not an official secret.

Having established that we have every right to produce a blog, management are now trying to get us to password protect it. What they want is for it to only be available to PCS members and not to general public. We have no intention of doing this. The blog is our ‘shop front’ and it is hoped promotes PCS (encouraging new members) and might make people think twice about privatisation. The wider implication seems to be that articles like the Key Targets article are making the agency look bad. Preposterous of course. Imagine for a minute that I’m in Next with my mate Billy Bunter, Billy tries on a ludicrously small T-shirt flounces out of the changing rooms and asks me if the T-Shirt makes him look fat. ‘No Billy, it doesn’t, it’s your fat that make you look fat.’

Lastly we come to the issue of management style. In years gone by Veterans Agency had a good relationship with TUS, there was an atmosphere where consultation and negotiation was normal. Staff satisfaction was high, client satisfaction was high, targets were achieved and the agency was generally respected by the ex-service associations. Post takeover there is not one Veterans Agency manager on the Agency Management Board, and just about every positive aspect has been turned around completely with the added bonus of a doubling of the sickness figures. We are now working in an (in)effective autocracy where negotiation and consultation is treated with contempt; where one man says ‘jump’ and expects us to all say ‘how high’. But this is not the military and there are processes to go through, checks and balances, processes that are being ignored. Just look at the ‘Close Innsworth’ fiasco. My point here is that if this is the way you set out your stall don’t expect those of us who care to come scraping round your skirts for titbits whilst promising to keep our mouths shut.